Perhaps sensing his comment had piqued media interest, he added flippantly, that women needed to do a better job of looking after the home. "I quite simply feel that they don't clean behind the fridge," said Mr Bloom, of the UK Independence Party, on his first day in the European Parliament.

Only time will tell if Mr Bloom is remembered for his comments, but plenty more pronouncements on the subject have made it to the record books.

Here are some of the most notable despatches from the gender war or words.

1. "I do, and I also wash and iron them."
Denis Thatcher, 1981, when asked who wore the trousers in his house

2. "The great question... which I have not been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'"
Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyst.

3. Women's rights now! (Yes dear)
(Perhaps apocryphal) graffito

On a similar wavelength: Farrah Fawcett and Denis Thatcher

4. If it were a lady, it would get its bottom pinched (If this lady was a car she'd run you down)
Graffito scrawled under advert for "the beautiful" Fiat 127, 1979

5. "Why can't a woman be more like a man?"
Henry Higgins, lyric from A Hymn to Him, My Fair Lady

6. "Women fail to understand how much men hate them"
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

7. "What passes for woman's intuition is often nothing more than man's transparency."
Author George Jean Nathan

8. "God made man stronger but not necessarily more intelligent. He gave women intuition and femininity. And, used properly, that combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I've ever met."
Actress Farrah Fawcett

9. "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."
Novelist Virginia Woolf